Sonia Colonna Mathis, GeorgetownMember Since March 2010Artist Statement I think I have always been drawing, and after a few art classes and a great deal of encouragement from family and friends, I decided that this was definitely the life for me. I focused on art classes in High School and continued my art education at The University of Texas at Austin. I found through the grueling critiques in college that your personal artistic expression becomes a target for personal criticism, which is difficult to overcome and will often generate feelings of inadequacy as an artistic communicator. I also found that humor and the ridiculous invited much more interesting discussion and was more fun to create. So i nurtured my tendency to put the ordinary in an odd arrangement. I love characters and am currently interested in unique characters in social arrangements. The Predators' Ball was my first art show to explore this subject. It was a collection of portraits and poems dedicated to the depiction of a social predator verses a social prey. I was inspired by fables and old tales used to warn the young, and had a great deal of fun! I had done quite a bit of research on animal totems and am always fond of comparing human behavior to animal characters.